Throughout many of the world’s mountain ranges snowpack accumulates during the winter and into the spring, providing a natural reservoir for water. As this reservoir melts, it fills streams and recharges groundwater for over 1 billion people globally. Despite its importance to water resources, our understanding of the storage capacity...
Forested, mountain landscapes in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) are changing at an unprecedented rate, largely due to shifts in the regional climate regime. Documented climatic trends across the PNW include increasing wildfire frequency and intensity and an increasingly ephemeral snowpack, especially at moderate elevations. One relationship that has yet to...
California's water resources vary throughout the state owing to the regions varying topography, diverse climate, and the distribution of precipitation. Most of the state's precipitation falls over the northern coastal range and the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Winter snowpack that accumulates within these mountain basins serves as...
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Anne W. Nolin
California’s water resources vary throughout the state owing to the regions
The western United States is experiencing significant changes in wildfire and snow regimes as a result of warming temperatures. An amplification of wildfire activity and reduction in snow water equivalent, snow covered area, and earlier spring snowmelt are documented trends that are projected to continue into the future. With an...
As global temperatures continue to rise there has been an increase in forest fire frequency and severity. With larger areas of forest being burned it is increasingly important to understand how forest fires effect snow processes. Previous research shows that burned areas will accumulate more snow and that this snow...
Declines in glacier area and volume are widespread. These changes will have important hydrologic consequences since glaciers store tremendous amounts of fresh water and buffer seasonally low flows in many densely populated regions. In this thesis I focus on a region that is hydrologically vulnerable to glacier change, namely the...
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Anne W. Nolin
Declines in glacier area and volume are widespread. These changes will have
Rising global temperatures are having lasting effects on mountain snow environments in the form of diminishing snowpacks, shorter accumulation seasons, and shifts in meltwater timing. Seasonal snowpack is a vital source of water for natural and human systems. In the forested mountain landscapes of the Pacific Northwest seasonal snowmelt feeds...
Forest canopy cover presents a major challenge for remote sensing of fractional snow-covered area (ƒSCA). Snow cover is systematically underestimated where satellites sensors cannot penetrate the forest canopy. Current canopy adjustments scale observable ƒSCA with the vegetation fraction, assuming that snow cover distributions are similar between sub-canopy and open locations....
Snow water equivalent (SWE) is a critical measurement in hydrology and water resources management. Microwave remote sensing can estimate snow water equivalent (SWE). However, the algorithms used to estimate SWE require snow grain size information. Thus, determining snow grain size is pertinent to estimate SWE. Currently, there are several models...
As a result of a warming climate, subsequent declining snowpack, and a century of fire suppression, forest fires are increasing across the western United States. However, we still do not fully understand how forest fire effects snowpack energy balance, nor the volume and availability of snow melt and associated water...